A Brief History of the Crypto Future: Seven Trends to Reshape the Industry Narrative in 2026

Author | @archetypevc

Compiled by Odaily Planet Daily ( @OdailyChina )

Translator | Dingdang ( @XiaMiPP )

Editor's Note: As we enter 2026, the focus of industry narratives is quietly shifting. Capital, infrastructure, user needs, and content distribution methods are undergoing structural adjustments. Archetype has compiled insights from several industry researchers to identify several emerging trends that may evolve into key investment windows in the coming year.

This article, translated by Odaily Planet Daily, aims to present readers with Archetype's insights into the underlying driving forces of the next stage of crypto applications, as well as the structural turning point that deserves the most attention in 2026.

When "chains built for applications" finally make sense: the perfect time for Appchain has arrived.

by Aadharsh Pannirselvam

In short: those blockchains that are deliberately designed, meticulously refined, and built and optimized based on underlying primitives around specific application scenarios will truly experience explosive growth in the next year or two.

The developers, users, institutions, and capital that have recently flooded the blockchain are very different from those in previous cycles. They have their own distinct cultures and preferences (that is, their definitions of "user experience"), which are often more important than abstract concepts such as "decentralization" and "censorship resistance." Sometimes, these needs fit with existing infrastructure; sometimes, they require completely different blockchain structures.

For abstract cryptocurrency applications like Blackbird and Farcaster, which are geared towards non-professional users, user experience is especially important. Designs that would have been considered unorthodox three years ago, such as node deployment, a single sequencer, and a custom database, are now considered the most reasonable solutions. The same applies to stablecoin chains or trading scenarios that heavily rely on latency and price accuracy (such as Hyperliquid and GTE).

But this is not the case for all new applications.

Today, a significant counterforce is growing: the preference for "privacy" from both institutions and individual users. Different applications have vastly different user experience needs, therefore their underlying blockchain architecture should not be uniform.

The good news is that assembling a supply chain that meets application requirements from scratch is much simpler than it was two years ago. Now it's more like "assembling a custom PC".

You can choose each hard drive, fan, and power cable yourself—but in most cases, this isn't necessary. You can choose from a range of highly matched, customizable preset configurations, just like choosing Digital Storm or a framework. If you need a degree of personalization, you can add your own components to these pre-configured options. This ensures both stability and high flexibility.

Similarly, when applications can freely assemble and adjust primitives such as consensus mechanisms, execution layers, data storage, and liquidity structures, they can construct chain forms with different cultural characteristics, allowing the application's own "experience definition" to be natively supported, thereby forming a differentiated competitive advantage. This difference is like the difference between ToughBook, ThinkPad, desktop tower PCs, and MacBooks—they are completely different, yet share some underlying commonalities.

More importantly, each component becomes a reversible "knob," eliminating concerns about affecting the whole system from a single change, and no longer being constrained by the upgrade pace of the parent protocol.

With Circle's acquisition of Malachite from Informal Systems, the importance of independently controlling "customized blockchain space" has become an industry trend. In the coming year, I expect to see more applications building their own chains and blockchain spaces quickly, just like using HashiCorp or Stripe Atlas, based on the "default templates" and underlying modules provided by Commonware, Delta, and others.

Ultimately, this will allow applications to truly control their own cash flow and build a moat through a chain structure that is more aligned with user experience.

The prediction market will continue to innovate (but only a few players will break through).

By Tommy Hang

In this cycle, prediction markets have undoubtedly been one of the best-performing application categories. Total transaction volume across the entire blockchain has repeatedly reached new highs, with weekly transaction volume consistently exceeding $2 billion, clearly indicating that this category has taken a crucial step towards becoming a mainstream consumer product.

Amidst the hype, a plethora of new projects are emerging that attempt to challenge Polymarket and Kalshi. However, identifying "genuine innovation" amidst the noise is key to determining which projects deserve our focus in 2026.

From a market structure perspective, I am most concerned with solutions that can reduce spreads and increase open interest . Although market creation remains permissioned and selective, liquidity in the prediction market remains thin for both market makers and traders. Optimal paths include optimizing routing systems, introducing different liquidity models, and improving collateral efficiency based on products such as lending.

Category-specific trading volume is a key factor in determining a platform's success or failure. For example, in November, over 90% of Kalshi's trading volume came from the sports market, illustrating that some platforms are naturally better positioned to compete for specific liquidity. In contrast, Polymarket's trading volume in both the crypto and political markets is 5–10 times higher than Kalshi's.

Of course, on-chain prediction markets still have a long way to go before they become truly "widespread." For example, the Super Bowl in 2025 alone generated $23 billion in off-exchange betting transactions, which is more than 10 times the total daily transaction volume of all current on-chain markets.

Closing this gap requires teams that can truly overcome the fundamental challenges of predicting the market. I will continue to monitor these players next year.

Agentic Curators: Extending the Next Layer of DeFi with "Smart Agents"

By Eskender Abebe

Today's DeFi "asset screening and risk allocation layer" is going to two extremes: either it is completely algorithmic (fixed interest rate curve, pre-set rebalancing rules), or it relies entirely on human intervention (risk control committee, active managers).

Agentic curators represent the third path: AI agents (LLM + tools + cyclical scheduling) manage the risks and strategies of vaults, lending markets, and structured products, not by executing fixed rules, but by "reasoning"—logical deductions about risks, returns, and position strategies.

Take Morpho's marketplace as an example: designing an attractive yield product requires defining collateral rules, LTV limits, and various risk parameters. Currently, this remains a human bottleneck, but intelligent agents can extend this process. Soon, you will see intelligent agent curators directly competing with algorithmic models and human managers.

So, when will DeFi's "Move 37" arrive?

Many fund managers hold extreme views on AI: some believe LLMs will automate all trading desks, while others believe they will immediately collapse in real markets. Both overlook the true structural shift: AI agents possess emotionless execution, systematic strategies, consistent policy constraints, and reasoning capabilities, while humans are prone to noise and pure algorithms are too fragile. In the future, LLMs will act as "architects," designing risk frameworks, strategy constraints, and portfolio structures, while truly high-frequency and sensitive computations will still be executed by deterministic code.

When the cost of deep reasoning drops to "a few cents," the most powerful vaults will no longer be managed by the smartest people, but driven by the most powerful computing capabilities.

Short videos will become a new "traffic portal".

By Katie Chiou

Short videos are becoming the default interface for global users to discover and purchase content. TikTok Shop's GMV exceeded $20 billion in the first half of 2025, nearly doubling year-on-year, gradually making global users accustomed to "watching and buying," with entertainment becoming the storefront.

Instagram is transforming Reels from a defensive product into a core revenue engine. This format brings greater exposure and is projected to account for an increasingly larger share of advertising revenue by 2025, according to Meta. Whatnot has already demonstrated that real-time, personalized sales methods can achieve conversions at a speed unmatched by traditional e-commerce.

The logic is simple: real-time viewing allows users to make decisions faster. Every swipe is a potential purchase opportunity. Therefore, platforms are rapidly blurring the lines between "recommendation feeds" and "payment processes," with the feed itself becoming a new sales point, and each content creator a distribution channel.

AI will accelerate this trend: reducing video production costs, increasing content volume, and allowing creators and brands to test ideas in real time. The more content and touchpoints there are, the more motivated platforms will be to optimize conversion rates every second.

Encryption perfectly aligns with this trend: faster content demands faster, cheaper, and programmable payment channels. As shopping becomes frictionless and directly embedded in the content itself, we need a system capable of settling small payments, programmatically allocating and distributing revenue, and tracking the contributions of all parties in the intricate chain of influence. Cryptocurrencies were born for such processes, and it's hard to imagine how the hyperscale era of streaming-native commerce would have evolved without them.

Blockchain will drive new AI Scaling Laws

By Danny Sursock

In the past few years, the AI narrative has been almost entirely dominated by giants and unicorns, while decentralized innovators have been largely overlooked. However, off the spotlight, several crypto-native teams have made remarkable progress in "decentralized training and inference," and have moved from whiteboard demonstrations to real-world testing and production environments.

Today, teams like Ritual, Pluralis, Exo, Odyn, Ambient, and Bagel are poised to "step onto the main stage" and usher in a golden age. This new generation of competitors is expected to have an explosive orthogonal impact on the fundamental trajectory of artificial intelligence development.

Distributed training environments are breaking through existing scalability limitations, and asynchronous communication and parallel solutions have been proven feasible in real-scale training tasks.

New consensus mechanisms and privacy technologies make "verifiable" and "confidential" reasoning a reality.

The next-generation blockchain architecture combines a "truly intelligent contract system" with a more general computing model, enabling AI agents to use crypto assets as a unified exchange medium to form a complete autonomous computing closed loop.

The groundwork has been completed.

The next challenge is to bring these underlying infrastructures to mass production and prove that blockchain can drive fundamental innovation in AI, rather than just being a concept slogan or a funding story.

RWA: Real-world assets will truly take root in the real world.

By Dmitriy Berenzon

Real-world assets (RWAs) have been discussed for years and are now finally seeing widespread adoption—the large-scale popularization of stablecoins, a smooth and complete onboarding and offboarding process, and a clearer regulatory framework have all contributed to this natural progression. According to data from RWA.xyz , more than $18 billion worth of various assets have been issued on-chain, compared to only $3.7 billion a year ago. This trend is expected to accelerate further in 2026.

It is important to note that “Tokenization” and “Vaults” are two different RWA design patterns: the former digitizes real-world assets, while the latter directs on-chain capital to offline revenue-generating scenarios.

In the future, I look forward to seeing assets on the blockchain cover a wider range of areas: from gold and rare earth elements to short-term credit for business operations, to public and private equity, and even more global fiat currencies. We can even be "bolder"—eggs, GPUs, energy derivatives, advance payroll, Brazilian government bonds, the Japanese yen… all could be on the blockchain.

Essentially, RWA is not about "putting more things on-chain," but rather about upgrading the way global capital is allocated. The high barriers to entry, low transparency, and decentralization of traditional markets can all be redefined on public chains and combined with DeFi primitives to achieve composability.

Of course, many assets will still face challenges such as transfer restrictions, lack of transparency, lack of liquidity, and inefficient risk management and distribution. Therefore, the infrastructure to solve these problems will be equally critical.

A product renaissance driven by agents is on the horizon.

By Ash Egan

The core of the next generation of the Internet will no longer be the apps we browse, but the "intelligent agents" we use for communication.

We all know that bots and agents are rapidly increasing their share of all online activity. A rough estimate puts this at around 50% today, including both on-chain and off-chain activities. In the cryptocurrency space, bots are increasingly involved in trading, managing, assisting, and scanning contracts, and performing a wide range of operations on our behalf, from token trading and fund management to smart contract auditing and game development.

This marks the beginning of the "programmable, agent-based internet." And 2026 will be the first year that cryptographic product design will truly be "agent-centric" (in a positive, non-dystopian way).

The future is still gradually taking shape, but at least for me, I hope to spend less time clicking between pages and more time managing on-chain agents in a chat-like interface: like Telegram, but with "application-specific/task-specific agents." These will be able to formulate and execute complex strategies, automatically gathering the most relevant information from the network, including transaction results, risks and opportunities to monitor, and curated information. I assign them tasks, and they track opportunities, filter out irrelevant information, and execute at the optimal time.

The infrastructure needed for this vision is already prepared on-chain. By combining the default open data graph, programmable micropayments, on-chain social graphs, and cross-chain liquidity tracks, we have everything needed to support a dynamic proxy ecosystem. The "plug-and-play" nature of the crypto world means that the cumbersome processes and obstacles that proxies need to face will be greatly reduced. Compared to Web2 infrastructure, the level of preparedness of blockchain for this proxy revolution cannot be overstated.

This might be the most crucial point here: it's not just about automation, but about truly liberating users from the data silos, friction, and pointless waiting of Web2. We're already seeing this massive shift in the search landscape: Google now provides an AI overview for about 20% of searches, and data shows that once users see this overview, they're significantly less likely to click on traditional search result links. Manually scrolling through pages of information is becoming redundant. Programmable agent-driven networks will further extend this experience to all the applications we use daily, which I think is fantastic.

In this new era, we will: reduce mindless spamming, reduce emotional panic trading, and completely eliminate time zone differences (no more saying "wait for the Asian market to wake up"). For both developers and ordinary users, interacting with the on-chain world will become simpler and more expressive.

As more and more assets, systems, and users come onto the chain, this cycle will continuously reinforce itself and accelerate. The more opportunities on the chain, the more smart agents deployed, the more value unlocked. The cycle repeats itself. However, what we build now, and how we build it, will determine whether this "agent-driven network" ultimately becomes a thin layer of noise and automation, or truly ignites a renaissance of empowering users, vibrant energy, and innovation.